Daily on my stroll to work I pass baguettes and brownies, red pepper and creme fraiche soup, Wiltshire-cured ham and Pret pickle sandwiches, all lovingly displayed on brightly lit shelves and begging to be enjoyed with a friend or two.

I can't propose this to a friend of two, however, because that would require saying aloud the name of the place from whence such bounty springs.

And I can't pronounce Pret A Manger.

Pray a mahn-jay? Pret a mahn-ger? Pret a man-gay? No earthly idea.

No longer content to confine my lunches to Subway and its easily pronounced brethren, I turned to David Reithoffer, chairman of Groupe Professionnel Francophone de Chicago, a local French networking group.

"You probably know that Pret A Manger is sort of a play on words with pret a porter, which means off-the-rack clothing, literally 'ready to wear,'" Reithoffer says. "In the case of Pret A Manger it means 'ready to eat.'"

I had heard that—rather, I had read that. If I'd heard it, I probably would know how to pronounce the place. Anyway, Reithoffer's wise counsel:

"Pret: Like 'pet' with an r in it."

"A: Like the ah in 'ah ha!'"

"Manger: Maw(n)-jzay, like Zsa Zsa Gabor but like the letter A sound at the end, like a blue jay but not the hard J sound."

Emboldened by my new knowledge, I reached out to Words Work readers to hear their pronunciation fears and, with a little help from a bunch of dictionaries (and Reithoffer), try to allay those fears.

• "Imprimatur," says Brendan Curran. "Which syllable is emphasized? Is the U short or is it like the U in mature? Or should I just say approval?"

Approval works just fine, since imprimatur means, according to American Heritage, "Official approval; sanction." But it's sort of the six-inch cold cut combo of words, if you catch our drift.

• "Is a cupola on the roof a coo-po-la or a kew-po-la?" asks Jim Champley.

"A domed roof or ceiling," according to Webster's, is pronounced KYOO-peh-la. This is seconded by howjsay.com, a talking English dictionary that offers pronunciations for thousands upon thousands of words.

OH-gull, according to American Heritage, which defines the word as "to look or stare at, especially in a desirous manner."

•"Sur la Table," says Dave Hatfield, a language lover who blogs at the hilarious malaphors.com. "When I try to pronounce this store, I sound like Kramer in the 'Seinfeld' episode when his tooth was extracted."

For this one we turned to Reithoffer again. Is that last word "tob" or "tob-lah"?

"Sort of between," he says. "Like tob(l) with the 'l' just slightly sounding at the end."